Flexibility Matters

In my recent conversations with my partners I’m seeing a trend of boredom and apprehension when it comes to solution positioning. Look, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to notice that all this venture capital fueled / speculative me-too world of technology is going to come to an ugly finish line. But, should you just cut your losses now and walk away?

That is certainly always an option.. but this doesn’t happen often:

When I see business owners that are taking on new opportunities, I see a lot more caution than optimism, more fear than excitement and with a good reason: people have been lied to a lot. And sometimes you make mistakes.

However, we are now well past the “What is cloud?” conversation and “But what about my hardware margins?” concerns and way, way, way past the “Is Microsoft trying to put me out of business?” fears.

The business of IT is no longer a what/who/how but just a matter of how fast.

We are certainly investing a lot in a wide platform and we’re even putting more resources towards endpoint management. Why?

Because people still use computers, phones and email to conduct business communication.

And the email address is the universal login credential.

For an entire generation.

Without a very big cost or annoyance associated with it.

So I’m spreading my business horizontally to tie in endpoints whereever they may be.

My advice to you (and everyone that has talked to me) is that this works: Nobody makes money playing with LEGO – they make it by selling it. So help more. My team is going to be there for the education, marketing support, technical assistance, migrations and everything else you need along with more tools that are just filtering down for free.

Money can be made fixing every problem. That is why there are tons of vendors and tons of coaches. Yet if you’re really to look deep inside your accounts receivable you’d probably have very few big digit lines and those are the ones you focus on improving. Heck, if it’s a big number it implies you’re good at it. Get better. Everything else – all the events and stories and dreams are fun fun distractions but that’s all they are – entertaining things that are distracting you from building a bigger better business.